JFK, 9/11 and Conspiracy Theories

"There
have been many things swept under the carpet. And I think
it's a shame in a government that you trust - I think it's a
shame, the things that they chose to tell you and the things
they choose not to tell you." -- Sept. 11 widow Julia
Sweeney, whose husband Brian worked in the World Trade
Center

"One of my greatest shames, as a journalist is
that I still don't know who killed Jack Kennedy." --
Hunter S. Thompson

Last January, Mike
Ward compared the post-9/11 conspiracy frenzy to what
occurred in the aftermath of JFK’s murder. "Angry
speculation -- focused mainly on government dirty dealings,
ulterior motives, and potential complicity in the attacks --
has risen to a clamor that easily rivals what followed the
Kennedy assassination," he wrote. [Alternet.org]

Inconsistencies in the
official story always take their toll, particularly when
there's a whiff of a cover-up. And certainly, news that the
White House will edit sensitive documents before handing
them over to the independent commission investigating Sept.
11 makes matters murkier. "The White House gets to
cherry-pick how much access the nation's commission looking
into 9/11 gets to crucial documents. I'm ready to vote for
subpoenas right now," former Senator Max Cleland told CNN,
evoking Warren Commission suspicion deja vu.

While it's
not surprising, as a New York Times /CBS poll
revealed, that 77 percent of Americans reject the Warren
Commission's findings, it seems that several government
officials did, too. Richard Nixon, for example, said that
the Warren Commission was "the greatest hoax that has ever
been perpetuated," [BBC] while Bill Clinton reportedly asked
Webster Hubble to find answers to two questions: "One, who
killed JFK? And, two, are there UFOs?"

Of course, without
history's hindsight, nobody knows if 9/11 questions will
capture the public's imagination the way those surrounding
John F. Kennedy's assassination have. And while some, like
Tucker Carlson, continue to disparagingly refer to "grassy
knoll conspiracy theories," a quick glance at this week's TV
listings shows exactly how enduring (and widely believed)
such theories are.

Though ABC plans to commemorate the
40th anniversary of JFK’s assassination by "irrefutably"
confirming that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, other
offerings include FOX’s JFK: Case Not Closed, The
Discovery Channel's Unsolved History: JFK
Conspiracy, Court TV’s JFK Assassination:
Investigation Reopened and Cinemax’s airing of Oliver
Stone’s JFK. Starting Nov. 18, The History Channel
is featuring Nigel Turner’s The Men Who Killed
Kennedy series, offering nine hours of individual
conspiracy segments over the course of three nights. And on
Sun. Nov. 23, they’ll air JFK and the Grassy Knoll,
with Kennedy assassination authors Gerald Posner, Mark Lane
and David Lifton debating new evidence, which, the listing
explains, "concludes that there may have been another gunman
on the grassy knoll."

Although there are at least 36
different JFK conspiracy theories, part of the lasting
allure of the Kennedy saga lies in the fact that new
information keeps bubbling to the surface. It seems that
while some fibs (like Condi Rice's assertion that nobody
imagined planes being used as weapons) are uncovered early
on, others take longer to unravel. It took nearly 40 years
and a team of British forensic scientists, for example, to
conclude, with 96.3% accuracy, there was most likely a
second gunman on the grassy knoll ("Study Backs Theory of
'Grassy Knoll,'" the
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56560-2001Mar25?language=printer
Washington Post, March 25, 2001).

Postcards from the
Bushy Knoll

While ex-British minister Michael Meacher
has openly wondered if 9/11 wasn’t conveniently allowed to
happen to pave the way for US global domination [The Guardian], it’s doubtful that a
majority of Americans entertain such claims. During a May,
2003 Hardball appearance, for example, political humorist
Bill Maher reflected what seems to be prevailing attitude
towards JFK and Sept. 11 theories. Uttering a confounded
"wow" after Chris Matthews admitted, "I believe in the
single bullet theory," Maher nevertheless balked when an
audience member suggested that Bush might have purposely
dropped the ball on 9/11.

British officials
notwithstanding, for the most part, American politicians
have tried to tiptoe around accusations that "Bush knew."
Calling for the FBI’s Phoenix memorandum and Bush’s Aug. 6,
2001 intelligence briefing to be handed over to
Congressional investigators, Sen. Hillary Clinton measured
her words carefully in May, 2002. "I am simply here today,
on the floor of this hallowed chamber, to seek answers to
questions," she said. "Questions being asked by my
constituents. Questions raised by our newspapers in New
York, such as the one with the headline 'Bush Knew.' The
President knew what? My constituents would like to know the
answers to those questions. Not to blame the President or
any American. But just to know. To learn from experience. To
do all we can to ensure that a 9/11 never happens again."

Al Gore, on the other hand, was more forceful in his Nov.
9, 2003 speech, when he suggested that Bush was attempting
to cover his hide. "In a revealing move, just three days
ago, the White House asked the Republican leadership of the
Senate to shut down the Intelligence Committee's
investigation of 9/11 based on a trivial political dispute,"
he said. "Apparently the President is anxious to keep the
Congress from seeing what are said to have been clear,
strong and explicit warnings directly to him a few weeks
before 9/11 that terrorists were planning to hijack
commercial airliners and use them to attack us."

Oddly
enough, George Bush, Sr.'s name was dragged through the
Kennedy assassination muck, too. In an F.B.I. memorandum,
dated Nov. 29, 1963, J. Edgar Hoover reported that the FBI
had briefed "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence
Agency" on the post-JFK assassination reaction of Cuban
exiles in Miami. [InternetPirate.com]). And a 1988 Nation
article entitled, "The Man Who Wasn't There, 'George Bush,'
C.I.A. Operative" suggested that Bush's Zapata Offshore Oil
Company was a front for CIA clandestine operations. "I know
[Bush] was involved in the Caribbean," a CIA operative said,
referring to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. And in an added twist,
Lee Harvey Oswald's suicidal friend, George DeMohrenschildt
had "George H.W. (Poppy) 1412 Ohio, also Zapata Petroleum
Midland" listed in his address book.

Media Trollops
Revisited

Though the press is meant to be a watchdog
for "we the people," since 9/11, it's been clearly complicit
in spreading governmental whoppers about everything from WMD
to Jessica Lynch. At times, it spoon fed us doozies
(remember the one about the hijacker’s passport surviving
the fiery crash into the World Trade Center?), while often,
it was merely guilty of sins of omission. 'I'm very
disappointed in the press," 9/11 widow Kristin Breitweiser
told Salon.com. 'I've been scheduled to go on 'Meet the
Press' and 'Hardball' so many times and I'm always canceled.
Frankly I'd like nothing better than to go head to head with
Dick Cheney on 'Meet the Press.' Because somebody needs to
ask the questions and I don't understand why nobody is."

This unholy alliance between the media and the government
was intact after the JFK assassination, too. Bertrand
Russell's 1964 essay, "16 Questions on the Assassination,"
for example, charged that the American media blindly
propagated "blatant fabrications" and largely ignored
"world-wide disbelief" in official US government claims. [LINK]

A 1992 Village Voice article
entitled "JFK: How the Media Assassinated the Real Story"
further chronicled government’s sins and the media’s
complicity. In a move that rivals the Bush administration’s
manipulation of WMD intelligence, Deputy Attorney General
Nicholas Katzenbach determined what the Warren Commission's
findings should be a year before the commission reached
them. "We need something to head off public speculation or
Congressional hearings of the wrong sort." Katzenbach wrote
in a 1963 memo. [LINK]

Chronicling ploys to achieve
this end, the Voice outlined tactics that are startlingly
familiar to the post-9/11 propaganda employed today. "[T]he
working press was a lobster in a trap," Bill Moyers
admitted. "Back then, what government said was the news."
While this phenomenon was recently witnessed whenever anyone
like Scott Ritter disputed the official story (Ritter was
accused, as Paul Zahn put it, "of drinking Saddam Hussein's
Kool-Aid"), such naivete was more forgivable during the
pre-Watergate era. Because of this, Johnny Carson's reaction
to Jim Garrison's Tonight Show appearance [Prouty.org] was hardly out of bounds.

"The function of the Warren Commission was to make the
American people feel that the [JFK assassination] had been
looked into so that there would be no further inquiries,"
Garrison told an incredulous Carson.

"I just can't
understand how you think that these men think they can get
away with it or for what reason they would do it," Carson
later responded.

By 9:00 the next morning, Garrison had
received more than 2000 telegrams from District Attorneys
across America, who felt that Carson's "nervous antagonism,"
was a sign that Garrison was onto something. Feeling the
need to apologize for Carson's demeanor (which was
nevertheless polite and jovial by today's shout-fest
standards), NBC sent out thousands of form letters saying,
"The Johnny seen on TV that night was not the Johnny we all
know and love. He had to play the devil's advocate, because
that makes for a better program."

The Price of
Secrecy

Years ago, Moyers also lent a credible voice
to those warning about America's "secret government."
Tracing the advent of our secretive and often grossly
unethical national security state to the National Security
Act of 1947, Moyers chronicled coups, dirty tricks and other
blowback-inciting activities. Citing at least eight
documented plans to kill Castro (including a plan to lace
his cigars with LSD), Moyers also reported on the CIA’s use
of the Mafia to conduct assassinations.

"It’s a chilling
thought," Moyers said, "made more chilling by the
assassination of John Kennedy. The accusations linger. In
some minds, the suspicions persist of a dark unsolved
conspiracy behind his murder. You can dismiss them, as many
of us do, but knowing now what our secret government planned
for Castro, the possibility remains: Once we decide that
anything goes, anything can come home to haunt us." [InformationClearingHouse.info]

Interestingly
enough, H. R. Haldeman hinted that Nixon had inside
information regarding the JFK assassination. 'Tell
Ehrlichman this whole group of Cubans [Watergate burglars] is tied to the Bay
of Pigs,' Haldeman quoted Nixon as saying, later adding, "It
seems that in all of those Nixon references to the Bay of
Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy
assassination." Others contend that Robert Kennedy didn't
want JFK's death to be fully investigated because it might
uncover the Kennedy White House's plans to assassinate
Castro.

Not surprisingly, Moyers revisited "the Secret
Government" in 2002, while reporting on how the Bush
administration used Sept. 11 and "national security" as a
backdrop to effectively repeal access to presidential
records -- along with the public's right to know. [PBS.org] (National security was also
evoked following the JFK assassination, prompting Bertrand
Russell to ask, "If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone
assassin, where is the issue of national security?)

Given
this White House’s unprecedented secrecy -- not to mention
ties to the Project for a New American Century, the Carlyle
Group, the Saudis and Halliburton -- it would be remarkable
if people didn’t speculate about hidden agendas. Rollbacks
in the Freedom of Information Act notwithstanding, perpetual
stonewalling of the Sept. 11 investigation adds to the
distrust. "Excessive administration secrecy on issues
related to the September 11 attacks feeds conspiracy
theories and reduces the public’s confidence in government,"
Sen. John McCain reminded.

Then, too, as more Americans
awaken to how deeply we’ve been lied to, those who didn’t
even realize that NORAD hadn’t scrambled jets from Andrews
Air Force Base on Sept. 11 must now be wondering why the
commission is having trouble procuring records of NORAD’s
activities. And now that Sept. 11 victims' family members
are warning that the 9/11 commission will not be able to
render "a full uncovering of the truth," [New York Times] even those with minimal
interest in the JFK case are bound to see parallels.

And,
as with the JFK assassination, there are simply too many
unanswered questions. How is it that, despite long-standing
procedures, the systems to safeguard America's skies failed
to function? Why didn’t the FAA notify NORAD until 32
minutes after losing contact with Flight 11? How is it that,
though nearly an hour and a half elapsed between Flight 11's
fateful detour and the time the Pentagon was hit, military
jets didn't intervene? How did the FBI miraculously know,
hours after the attacks, to go the flight school where
hijackers had trained -– though an agent told one 9/11 widow
that there were too many flight schools to investigate
pre-Sept.11 claims that Al Qaeda operatives were training in
America? And why-oh-why did George W. Bush sit in that
Florida classroom, after learning that a second plane hit
the World Trade Center -- and then repeatedly claim that he
saw the first plane hit while watching TV at the school? The
list goes on and on, but at this point, you might as well be
searching for JFK’s stolen brain.

But who knows? Maybe
decades from now, vital information will come to the
forefront and we’ll finally understand exactly what happened
on Nov. 22, 1963 and on Sept. 11, 2001. In the meantime,
sentient beings will wonder why pertinent facts remain
hidden, and will continue to dismiss lame explanations like
the magic bullet theory and "they hate us for our freedoms."
Because no matter what Tucker Carlson says, given the
mysteries surrounding JFK's assassination and Sept. 11, the
term "conspiracy theory" eventually loses its stigma, as
truth-deprived minds try to fill in the blanks -- even if
(as this week's TV fare suggests) it takes 40 years to do
so.

STANDARD DISCLAIMER FROM
UQ.ORG: UnansweredQuestions.org does not necessarily
endorse the views expressed in the above article. We
present this in the interests of research -for the relevant
information we believe it contains. We hope that the reader
finds in it inspiration to work with us further, in helping
to build bridges between our various investigative
communities, towards a greater, common understanding of the
unanswered questions which now lie before us.

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